


Cold as Ice

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Creepy, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Hurt Sam Winchester, Mental Hospitals, Psychic Sam, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-12 23:55:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7954024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ghosts. Mental hospitals. Of course everything goes wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold as Ice

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the ohsam Triple Play challenge of 2015- reposted now. The prompt by kettle-o-fish:
> 
> 1.) Byberry Mental Hospital  
> 2.) Dean  
> 3.) botched lobotomy

The Pacifists that worked this hospital never mentioned the sun and moon wallpaper. Stars on the ceiling in the death-house—Orion there, the Pleiades here—quiet, unassuming pattern that was perhaps meant to be comforting. Superimpose the history the Winchesters have with ceilings and the chalked death outline would encompass the Auriga, Canis Major, Sirius as large as a burning heart. Where they first bled—gut-flower bloom—Draco and Pegasus, forever poised in fight.  
  
Mother. Lover. Sam mumbles about both. He can’t remember Jessica’s name right now, keeps asking Dean why, but _look up and the ceiling burns,_ he says. _Look down and there’s Hell._ Fire. _We’ve been trapped in fire all our lives, Dean, but now we’re cold._ A pause. And then Sam adds, worriedly, this can’t be real.  
  
Dean can’t see him, can only feel him rattling the cot he’s strapped to, rattling Dean along with it. He hears Sam strain to look over the side of the cot, sees a few drops of blood hit the filthy hospital floor.  
  
 _I’m right here, Dean says_. You hang on.  
  
There are ashes drifting down from the ceiling. It lands on Dean’s shoulders, his lap, his useless legs and arms, swanning like spider-thread. Sunlight diffuses in pink novae through holes in the architecture, and turns the ashes lilac. Dean wishes it were acid, which may eat through the shackles so he could get free. Instead, it collects. The ashes, and paint flakes, and cement chips, and petrified insects. It builds up around him. Around them both. This ruin.  
  
Dean’s not sure what it is, who’s doing it.  
  
They could suffocate. On the ashes, and the curled up spiders, and the frozen moths. They could suffocate on their own dry tongues, the dust powdering their mouths, the blood freezing in their veins. They could suffocate on the must and the thick disuse and that special haunted-space molecular heaviness that fattens the air in here. If the ghosts didn’t get to them first.  
  
 _My head hurts,_ says Sam. _Something’s wrong with my head._  
  
Tiny voice; definite slur. Dean says nothing. He thinks he’s going to throw up if he tries.  
  
 _(Is this real?)_  
  
***  
  
There are three, according to Sam. Three ghosts.  
  
Sam of the meticulous research into haunted asylums which in the end, don’t come of much use except in reinforcing already disturbing stories when the ghosts toss them around and steal their things.   
  
_The death-house is where they kept violent-delusional-suicidal types,_ Dean remembers him reading. _Get this: once, this dude broke free of his restraints and jammed a spoon in another guy’s jugular._  
  
Sam’s fingers kept straying to his palm, almost healed now. Maybe it was too soon for them to tackle a haunted asylum after Sam and his psychotic breaks, but Sam had found this case (Byberry Mental Hospital in Pennsylvania, and hell, even Dean knew _this_ story, the place was the Alcatraz of asylums) and Dean didn’t know how to get out of it without implicating that Sam was not at his 100%. Which would just lead to a lot of Sam-angst. He’d rather just take haunted asylums over angst.   
  
They’d looked at photos, taken by WW2 Pacifists who’d brought the hospital down. With naked men and patients strapped down to cold metal cots and a ridiculous count of trans-orbital lobotomies, the place was a downright horror story even before there ever was a whiff of a haunting. Foreboding, yes, but Dean had been flying on a cocktail of Sam-crazy and ancient tablets and Leviathans, and a classic wham-bam case sounded good right then.  
  
They’d been doing well. Stake-out tent at the back, a whole lotta supplies, and sacks of rock-salt for too many ghosties. Sam found a mound of bones in an unnamed grave out the back before they’d even actually set foot inside the place. The snow was falling, and the fire in the grave had screamed normal, a return to the ordinary for them, loop-back to less-complicated times.  
  
And then came the death-house.

Three ghosts.   
  
The doctor with buckshot wounds in his centre, drip-dripping at the corner, poring over a chart. The shadow-scarecrow that (Sam says) is adhered to his bed, hip-side, stuck there as though with mucilage, cold to the touch. And the tattooed man: smooth arms pecked with needle-pricks like measles spots, antlers on his head.  
  
(Antlers? Dean asks.)  
  
Get him away, says Sam. _Dean? Please._  
  
He struggles; the cot shakes violently, and Dean shakes with it at its base, tied to its legs, motionless.   
  
(Get him away, get him away. It hurts.)  
  
Ghosts are a whoosh, an ice-bucket to the stomach, a twist of the guts in this place. A whispered promise to _make things better, make your head feel better._ A diseased mouth over his own, quieting him when he tries to scream, a whisper: _ssshh, don’t aggravate the patient._  
  
He’s not your patient, Dean screams. _He’s not your fucking patient, you motherfucking sicko!_  
  
 _We know it must be difficult_ , says the whisper. A head wisps out of the near-dark, flashing eyes, pale mouth. Intimations of bone clear through sagging skin. _But he’ll be good as new when we’re done here._  
  
Dean glimpses antlers, a hammer, a glimmer of metal. A long body, ghostlight glimmering along its spine.   
  
The man-ghost-thing clambers away from Dean.   
Dean’s gun is gone. Sam’s too, but Sam is in no condition to shoot anything anyway.  
  
The cot sags with the weight of the ghost.   
  
Sam moans, thinly.  
  
He babbles about Hell and fire and the Devil. And then he tells the ghost that, you know, they chipped away at Rose Kennedy’s brain with a Freeman ice-pick while she counted numbers, and they chipped till she couldn’t count. And Tennessee Williams, didn’t he have a thing against ice-picks in the brain? _He did._  
  
(My brother says it’s disturbing that I know all this.)  
  
(Dean?)  
  
(Dean, is this real?)  
  
The cot slides a little across the floor. Stars swim wetly in Dean’s vision. He thinks things are flying in the room, floating about, and then the cot slides again, halfway across the room, as if in distress. The ash falls faster. They’re going to drown in this stuff; they’re going to be buried if Sam doesn’t—  
  
Hey! Dean shouts. Hey! You wanna fix someone, fix me! Anger issues, PTSD—whatever the fuck turns you on, I’ve got it.   
  
Come at _me_ , you bastards, says Dean. _Come ON._  
  
Nothing. Apparently, devil visions are the only gold-class here. Everywhere in this room is a cold spot. Dean’s breath comes out in snowy white puffs. The sunset turns the room crystal orange, like sugared candy. Look gauzy, and the blistering walls could be on fire.  
  
Sam, he says. _Sam, can you hear me?_  
  
 _Scrape off all you want, says Sam, just don’t take away the stars; don’t take away the stars please, please—_  
  
Dean locks his tongue between his teeth and tastes blood and spits. He feels acid fear seep through him.   
Dean shouts at him to shut up, for God’s sake, _shut up._  
  
Don’t talk to him, Sam. Please.  
  
 _Sam!_  
  
 _The stitches go under the skin,_ Sam wails. _Don’t cut them loose--_  
  
A beat.   
  
Dean waits, but Sam goes abruptly, horribly quiet.  
  
Dean can’t see him, doesn’t know. All he knows is that they need to get out of this place—get Sam out before the ghosts did too much damage. There’s nothing sharp around here to pick the lock on his shackles. His wrists bleed. He’s never felt more useless in his life.   
  
And then his gun lands in his lap.   
  
Before Dean can go for it though, the doctor wraps a freezing hand over Dean’s mouth, another around his throat. The blood from his ghostly wounds sloshes into Dean’s lap, icy cold.   
  
Darkness begins to creep up Dean’s vision. He can’t breathe. Light dances on the walls, leaping tongues.   
  
The thing with the antlers glitters above Dean, ghost-flicker, and then the doctor replaces him again.  
  
 _Sshh,_ the doctor says. _We make people better here._  
  
 _We make them right._

 

***  
  
Dean wakes up dangling from the ceiling.  
  
His feet kick at nothing. Then the cot flips and smashes against the far wall. And again. On the third smash, his cuffs break loose. He drops; one leg buckles under him, the pain is like fire. He screams but makes no sound. His voice is muffled by ash.   
  
Smoke.  
  
The cot drops too. There’s no time to take stock of the damage: Dean rushes, he hauls ass. Sam’s dead-weight against him, gone utterly still. His eyes are blank slivers, colorfast grey. His breath ghosts against Dean’s neck, though, which is—which is good enough for now, good enough.   
  
There’s no sunset—Dean thinks—he was mistaken. There’s no sunset, there’s no sugar-candy brightness. The hospital is _actually_ on fire. Someone set it on fire. Ashes spark and cackle. The insect-corpses burn.   
  
The thing with the antlers takes shape all of a sudden, comes right at them, but it burns too. Sparks light up Dean's vision.   
  
He grabs Sam and wheels around, but he can’t find an exit, can’t find a door. Then, a window explodes outward.   
  
Dean drags them out through it, the glass sharp and skittering across their skin, thin trails of blood blossoming. He doesn’t care about that right now. He gets them through, and somehow, somehow the Caddy they stole from the last town is _here_ , not parked out back with the rest of their stuff. It sits in the grass, right next to them, and Dean thinks it’s a patina of grime on it, all that brown stuff, until he gets closer and thousands of moths take off into the air with a whoosh like a tornado.  
  
 _What the fuck._  
  
Sam’s eyes are bleeding, but at least there’s no metal spike still stuck in his brain. Dean bundles him up in the shotgun seat and he goes, easy as a doll. He’s breathing steadily though, pulse even. He mumbles something quietly, and Dean thinks, they’ll need help. This is fucked up at a level that Dean can’t fix. Dean’s not sure where to go though, maybe call Cas, call _someone_ , but right now, he climbs into the car and guns the engine.  
  
When they get to it, the gates fly open for them. The radio flickers on, zips past the Taylor Swift, lands on _Cold as Ice_. Some moths land on the windshield, and the wiper flicks on.  
  
Smooth. Quick. Solitary.  
  
“Sammy?” Dean says.

 

 

 


End file.
